#44 - Empire at the Periphery Part 1

 This week, and over the next weeks, we will be jumping back into the land of Swanendael and the Whorekill. I’ve spent a lot of time wondering about the larger societal, cultural, and economic world outside the edges of the Delaware Bay in the 1600s. Why was Swanendael settled where it was? Why would a fort have been built there in 1659? Why did the Lord Baltimore send raiders to destroy the Whorekill in the 1670s? The on-again-off-again settlement clearly wasn’t something on the same level of importance as New Amsterdam (AKA Manhattan) or Jamestown; it was just a tiny bit of land on the periphery, on the sidelines of history.

So, it's a good thing I stumbled upon Empire at the Periphery, huh? It was published in 2011, written by Christian Koot, a professor at Towson University in Maryland. I first heard of him on a podcast I mentioned last week - Ben Franklin’s World, where he talks about a newer book, a bit of a side story to Empire, called A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman’s Chesapeake, which was published in 2017. It’s about a really interesting man who traversed New Netherland, Virginia, and Maryland in the 1600s and who made a very important map of those areas (more about that later, spoilers, dear reader). It led me to researching Christian Koot because I hoped he could be an expert in this area of the Mid-Atlantic in the 1700s. I desperately need to find someone who knows more about this topic if I hope to be able to move forward with any for the RHH and Lewes because I need to know what the state of the field is and where/how I can contribute. 

Enter Empire at the Periphery: British Colonies, Anglo-Dutch Trade, and the Development of the British Atlantic, 1621-1713. I admit, at first glance, it does not quite seem to fit the bill. During the first half of that time period, Swanendael/the Whorekill was either Dutch or unsettled. But it does cover the turbulent time of the Lord Baltimore Raids, the transition to the Duke of York, and the handoff to William Penn. I hoped that Koot’s book would help me understand what was going on along the Delaware Bay at this time. I hoped it would start to fill in some blanks about the big political powers playing tug-o-war over the area and also about the smaller interpersonal issues going on about what it meant to be Dutch or English; a Marylander, a Virginian, a New Netherland-ite, or a New Yorker in this period. 

This book does focus a lot on the English side of the equation, but this hundred year period involves a lot of English and Dutch interactions, positive and negative. Koot organizes the book to look at both the government/imperial level and the merchant/trader/farmer level as a way to analyze relationships and commerce during the time when the English and Dutch were establishing their empires and colonies. Often the history of this time is understood in pretty clear cut ways; the English had their colonies and they traded with the homeland back in England. The Dutch did the same, just with a bit less agriculture in the New World. But as Koot points out in the book, this is really just the way they, being the governments and politicians, hoped things would work. In the real world, these colonies were just trying to survive. They were all within the first few decades of European settlement with no guarantee of success. So. The colonists did what all people do in unstable and possibly dire situations: they adapt and find creative solutions. 

Empire takes an in depth look at these processes, how the colonists worked within and without the system to survive on the edges of empire. Koot uses three places as case studies: the Leeward Islands, Barbados, and New Amsterdam (AKA Manhattan/NYC). He then breaks the book up into three parts, each with two parts, chronologically. This post will go over the first part, the first two chapters, which covers 1621 through 1659. This basically covers the establishment of the three case study sites, the English Civil War, the first Navigation Act of 1651, and the first Anglo-Dutch War which was from 1652-1654. 

Koot’s first case study, the British Leeward Islands, are all small islands surrounded by other small islands with foreign colonial settlements: Spanish, Dutch, French, etc. From the beginning they often fell prey to Spanish raids which caused the English colonists to reach out to other foreign groups for help, namely their Dutch neighbors. This started relationships that focused on cross-national, intercolonial trade and support. The Dutch would trade with the colonists of the Leeward Islands for their tobacco crop in exchange for manufactured goods brought over from Europe. This isn’t say the Leeward colonists didn’t trade with English merchants, they simply traded with whatever merchants came ashore; the settlements were too new and vulnerable to be able to pick and choose who they traded with, much to the English government’s consternation. By the 1650s, the Leeward Islands colonists had started to allow Dutch merchants to have warehouses in which to build up cargoes of goods for transport. The Dutch tobacco trade was more lucrative to the colonists than the English version, so despite the Navigation Act of 1651, the colonists continued to trade with the Dutch. The Leewards’ colonial government however tried something else; if they couldn’t force their people to stop trading with the Dutch, then they would make it more attractive for English merchants to trade with the colonists. And so, they lifted dues to English merchants trading at the Islands. 

Barbados, Koot’s second case study, had a similar beginning. The island is in the Eastern Caribbean, so they suffered fewer predations by the Spanish, but still struggled to find a way to have a stable crop and settlement. They also started with tobacco, but once the prices tanked, instead of intensifying their relationship with the Dutch, the Barbados colonists switched over to sugar cane. They continued to trade with the Dutch for manufactured goods, but after the Navigation Act, and through the first Anglo-Dutch War, they shifted to strengthening their relationships with England based merchants. This allowed the colonists to have access to credit for the cycle of growing/processing/selling/transporting sugar cane. The trade with the Dutch gave them access to a more diverse selection of goods, as well as just more opportunities for trade; but the trade with the English allowed the plantations to grow and become more profitable. ...It also didn’t hurt that by this time in the mid-1600s, the Dutch had secured their system of trade in enslaved Africans, who would be a crucial part of the production of sugar cane.

Finally, the third case study, New Amsterdam is a bit different all together. For one, I found it interesting that a book about English colonists and the founding of the British Empire would use a Dutch founded city as an example, but it does show a different perspective in the way the English and the Dutch interacted in these early colonial years. New Amsterdam was founded, not as an agricultural settlement, but as a trading post. It was the main base for trade throughout New Netherland (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware). Dutch traders would bring back furs and other goods from in-country to New Amsterdam, then the goods would be taken for sale back in Europe. But like the Leeward Islands and Barbados, the early years at New Amsterdam were far from stable, they also needed to trade creatively to ensure their survival. So, the New Amsterdamers turned to their English neighbors for trade, especially to Virginia for tobacco. New Amsterdam was also structurally different than the other two case studies in that it was founded as a company town by the Dutch West India Company who had a monopoly on trade; this ended in 1639, and the colonial Dutch traders intensified the opportunities offered by trading manufactured goods to their English neighbors. This was timed pretty well considering the unstable times England was going through with their Civil War. Dutch colonists also realized how much easier it was to trade with the English on smaller scales by creating warehouses to stockpile shipments to Europe. Except, unlike at the Leeward Islands, they created the trading hub on Dutch soil at New Amsterdam. This allowed the Dutch to trade on a smaller scale, with smaller ships and crews, up and down the Atlantic seaboard. They could also fly under the radar of the English Navigation Act by working in this way. 

So, this is the first part to Empire at the Periphery, it analyzes the way the Leeward Islands, Barbados, and New Amsterdam conducted trade to get through the early uncertain time at the beginning of their colonies. They each approached it from different angles, with different techniques, but overall with the same strategy: survive. Despite what the far away parent governments thought, the colonists knew the only way they were going to survive was to work with their neighbors despite their national origins. The colonists prioritized opportunities for trade that built steady relationships over time and that would bring individuals greater benefits. I found this so interesting because this 1620s-1650s period is also the most turbulent period for Lewes. Swanendael certainly failed for reasons that Koot did not get into, namely the relationships with the native peoples, which were certainly a major part of trade in New Netherland, but that shows how closely colonists walked the line between success and failure. It may also explain why another serious attempt at settlement at the Whorekill took decades to occur; if it was so difficult to survive at the edges of empire, it would make sense that unsuccessful attempts would be remembered and not repeated. 

Over the next weeks I will cover the other two parts to Empire at the Periphery, it will be interspersed with some other fun posts, so keep an eye out! The next part will cover 1660-1689, which should be interesting since this covers the Second Anglo-Dutch War and the handoff from New Netherland to New York. It also covers the original building of the Ryves Holt House and the Lord Baltimore Raids. Stay tuned, dear reader.